problem solver37

diane rodham

November 15, 2011 11:50 PM

The light was on and it wasn’t one of those overhead lights. The illumination emitting from a laptop computer just before midnight was the only light in the house with the one exception of the small glowing red dot from the nearby coffee pot. At this hour her mind was a jumbled mess of ideas.Her fingers should have pounding the keys of the outdated computer, but they were restless and flailing around without any real control. She was wearing a skirt and a very chic matching black top. She hadn’t gone out at all during the day, but for some reason she couldn’t concentrate in her pajama clothing. Her blonde hair would have seemed brilliant, but no one would have ever known in the darkness. The white light from the computer and the red dot of glow from the overused coffee pot did not do her beauty any justice. She kept repeating the line “Deadline Midnight…deadline midnight…deadline, midnight.” Why could she not write?

She had to write. She always wrote and she was rather good at it…better than just good. She was amazingly success-ful. She had loads of financial wealth. She had a large empty house. She had an expensive wardrobe, which she could have worn at anytime of day she wanted. The food prices were the problem, though. The article on food prices for her column. “If so much food didn’t go to waste, the people on the news wouldn’t talk about rising food prices so often” was the only sentence appearing on the white Microsoft Word page. Food prices.

“”

Deadline midnight...Deadline midnight...deadline mid-night.

That was when I killed her.

Why was she writing about food prices? She didn’t care about food prices. She bit her lip as the internal composition of her mind began to crumble, like poorly made devil’s food cake due to the lack of substance. “Deadline Midnight…deadline midnight…deadline mid-night.” The confusion was running through her blood as her submission deadline was approaching in nine minutes, and she had nothing more than a single sentence on her computer in the darkness. What was there to say about something that seemed possibly important during certain conversations and served as a space-filler for fundraisers and political campaigns? Why didn’t she care about the subject? Why did she pick the subject if she didn’t care about it? Why was her brain chemistry only throwing out questions into nothingness instead of solving the targeted problem? She kept biting her lip, and if she added any more pres-sure, blood would spill all along her finest business casual clothing, which was uncomfortable and out of place. “Deadline Midnight…deadline midnight…deadline mid-night.”

Her eyes kept shifting around the room and she wasn’t sure why or where she was looking. Her thoughts were destroyed as fast as they were even created. The magical glue that somehow held her brain together was now nothing more than the adhesive on a blank pad of post-it notes. “Deadline midnight…Deadline midnight…deadline mid-night.” Food prices? She knew nothing about food prices. Budgeting Soccer Moms….. Penny Pinchers…. Overdramatic Infomercials …. Malnutrition.... Child Starvation….

ps+